They bought the Lakers for twelve and a half billion dollars, marked them up two and a half billion in fourteen months, and called it investment. The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims reported yesterday that Joshua Kushner — the venture capitalist whose Thrive Capital owns a major stake in OpenAI — and the former Walt Disney chief Bob Iger agreed to acquire the Los Angeles Lakers from Mark Walter, the Guggenheim Partners founder who is selling partly because his firm is under federal investigation for private-credit lending and short on cash. Walter paid ten billion for the franchise in 2025; a person close to the deal told the Journal he accepted Kushner’s offer inside seventy-two hours, “as if Kushner made an offer on a house.”
Fourteen months. Two and a half billion dollars of value created by nobody who put on a uniform. That is what your movement now means by the free market when applied to the things you say you love.
The argument from the Kushner school runs something like this. Capital is being eaten alive by AI; the algorithm is coming for your profession, your portfolio, your pension. But a community’s identification with its team is older than the screen in your pocket and will outlast it. The “iconic franchise” thesis is, on its face, conservative: hold what is real and lasting; do not chase what the technologists are throwing off the back of the truck; put your money where people still actually gather.
I have some sympathy for the impulse. A generation that watched its savings get drawn down by a tape it could not see has a right to look for things that cannot be screenshotted. The family farm is one such thing. The parish is one such thing. The lodge is one such thing. A team a city raises its children around is one such thing.
But that is not what is happening here. Read what Thrive Capital actually built, in the Journal’s own account, and what you find is not a man buying a team to love it. You find a man who already owns pieces of two other NBA franchises, whose Thrive Holdings arm is “rolling up accounting firms and other traditional businesses and infusing them with AI,” and whose separate Thrive Eternal arm exists to buy “supposedly AI-proof” properties such as the Lakers. The team’s purpose in his portfolio is to sit on the other side of the ledger from the AI bets. The team’s purpose in his portfolio is to be the thing the algorithm cannot eat. The same circuit that channels tech billionaires’ money into political nonprofits is now channeling it into the franchise fee for an NBA team, and the men on both ends of the wire are reading from the same hymnal.
The Lakers are not, in Kushner’s mouth, a community institution. They are a yield-bearing asset whose currency happens to be the loyalty of three million Angelenos, and the language his own people used to the Journal — “AI-proof” — tells you what kind of asset it is. I sat at a desk like that once. The men there never looked at the men in the field. They looked at the multiple. The men at Thrive, I promise you, are running the Lakers’ multiple, not the Lakers’ payroll.
You can see the same pattern one layer down. Mark Walter did not buy the Lakers to lose money. He bought them in 2025 for ten billion because Guggenheim Partners’ private-credit book needed a trophy to attract capital. He is selling them in 2026 for twelve and a half billion because the federal investigation is closing in and the firm needs liquidity. The team, in both men’s hands, was a chip — placed on one side of a bet, lifted, placed on the other side. Fourteen months. Two and a half billion dollars of value nobody who works for the team created. Walter did not put his name on the building. He did not hire a coach of his own. He did not, as far as anyone can tell, build anything a fan will remember. He held it. The team was, for him, exactly what the corn was for me: a line on a balance sheet, except his line is denominated in Shaq-era jerseys and Larry Bird jerseys and a building in Inglewood, and his leverage was twelve and a half billion dollars of other people’s belief that a basketball team is worth twelve and a half billion dollars.
I used to walk a trading floor where men argued about corn the way other men argue about weather — what was planted, what was drought-stricken, what would come off the combine in October — and the people who grew the corn never met the people who bet on it, and the people who bet on it never thought about the people who grew the corn. We were not evil. We were simply not there. The Chicago pit had no connection to the Iowa field except the ticker, and the ticker was a fantasy. That is what Thrive Eternal has now built at the scale of professional sport: the ticker, with no field, no town, no one to remember who used to own what.
That is the rentier economy applied to a franchise, and it is the betrayal your movement would have once recognized as such. The Lakers used to be owned by Jack Kent Cooke, who put his name on the Forum. He was a bastard in his own way, but he was a local bastard — he flew his helicopter to the games and sat courtside and argued with the referees and showed his face. Dr. Jerry Buss, who bought the team in 1979 for sixty-seven and a half million dollars, built Showtime and went to nine championships and was seen at every game and was mourned at his funeral by people who knew him by sight. That was an ownership. It was rooted, and it was often ugly, and it made the Lakers the Lakers. Now the Lakers are an “iconic franchise” that Thrive’s “core investment thesis” prizes as “immune from technological disruption” — a phrase that is to a city what a mausoleum is to a parish. It is the building left over after the people are gone. The Lakers belong to no one now. They will belong to whoever has the next twelve and a half billion when the multiple needs refreshing. They will be flipped again. They will be moved, eventually, if the next buyer decides the city has stopped yielding enough. They will be put up against the next AI bet on the next Thrive ledger, the way your 401(k) is put up against the next quarterly earnings call: a thing to be optimized, not a thing to be loved.
There is another way, and we have known about it for a hundred and three years. If you want to see what an unbonded team looks like, drive to Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Green Bay Packers have been publicly owned since 1923. They are a non-profit corporation with more than five hundred thousand shareholders — none of whom can hold more than two hundred thousand shares — and they will never be sold to a billionaire, because they cannot be sold. They are owned, in the literal sense of the word, by the people who show up on Sundays. About five million shares are held, most of them in Wisconsin and most of them ordinary. The Packers have won four Super Bowls and lost more games than any other franchise in the league, and they have not moved, and they will not move, and when they needed a new stadium the community voted to pay for it because the community, in a small and stubborn and admirable way, owns the team. The Packers are not the most valuable franchise in the NFL, and they have never been flipped for a 21 percent annualized gain — because they are not an asset. They are a team.
That is the answer that does not centralize. It is not the state. It is not the conglomerate. It is the cooperative — the same idea that built our rural electric co-ops, the same idea that built the credit union in the next county over, the same idea that built the farmers’ co-op I manage.
I grew up in Adams County, which is Packers country the way the Bronx is Yankees country, and I will tell you what I saw at the parish and the lodge and the co-op when I was young. Men rooted for the Packers the way they rooted for the place they were born — not because the Packers were an asset class, but because the Packers were theirs in a way the word “ownership” only half captures. Some of them held shares, the way their fathers held shares before them. Those shares did not appreciate at twenty-one percent annualized. They appreciated in the way a pew in a parish appreciates: by being the pew you sat in on the day your child was baptized.
That is not a yield. But it is the only thing that has ever held a community together against the men in the building.
The Lakers were the same trick, once. So were the Cowboys. So were the Knicks. We sold them. We sold them because we let the language of asset classes replace the language of community, and we let the men who fly in twice a year tell us that this was investment, and we believed them because the alternative — owning the thing ourselves — would have required us to show up. The reason the model has not spread is that the leagues themselves were rebuilt, in the last thirty years, to keep ownership concentrated, and the federal tax code was rewritten to make flipping franchises the path of least resistance. Those are political choices. They can be unmade.
The team a city raises its children around is not a yield. It never was. And the men in the building who bought yours for twelve and a half billion dollars know it.